Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
A Soyuz capsule today safely landed in Kazakhstan, returning three astronauts (one American and two Russians) back from ISS after a six month mission.
The Cut Jib Newsletter podcast, produced by JJ Sefton of the Cut Jib Newsletter blog and CBD (a regular contributor to the Ace of Spades website), graciously recorded an hour-long interview with me yesterday. That podcast is available here and here. I have also embedded it below.
The main topic was the three-part essay I wrote last week, attempting to predict the many crazy and anti-American tactics we can expect from the Democratic Party in the coming months, before and after the election. We went into this at length, and both Sefton and CBD added some points that I had missed, which was very illuminating.
We also spent some time talking about space stuff, but because it is a political blog most of that discussion revolved around the politics that is presently helping or hampering the development of a new American space industry, independent of government control.
Listen to it all. I think you find it worthwhile. And note, when I discuss my book, Conscious Choice, there was one moment where I was going to illustrate an additional reason the book is worth reading, but then my mind went blank. I can tell you now that this point was how Conscious Choice puts the lie to the Marxist 1619 project that claims falsely that American was built solely on the backs of slaves. I tell the real story, and it says very much the opposite, that America was built on freedom, and the slave states of the South only acted to hinder its development into the wealthiest, freest, and most successful nation on Earth, in all history. More important, that success was for all its people, not just those in charge.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
The link lets you download or view a pdf of the comic book.
According to Jay, rumors are now suggesting that the delay for the next Vulcan launch is not due to preparing Sierra’s Tenacity Dream Chaser cargo ship, but Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines that Vulcan requires. I doubt this. Tenacity only started its environmental testing a few weeks ago, and this testing can take at minimum two months, and more if anything goes wrong and needs fixing.
The satellite has tested “key propulsion techniques [and using] a 3D printed storage box.” That’s all they tell us.
A true battle of insects. Boeing had been hired by Virgin to build a new mother airplane for its suborbital flights. After doing some work, Boeing decided the job couldn’t be done, withdrew, but then sued to get paid. Virgin is now claiming Boeing’s work was “shoddy and incomplete” and so poor it doesn’t deserve any payments.
She thus confirms what I have been saying now for several years, since Biden took power. The federal government is now a major obstacle to private enterprise and innovation.
Pegasus was intended to reduce orbital costs, but it never did so, and is now defunct because its cost can’t compete with SpaceX and others.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 21, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled “banded terrain and layering,” it actually is a good example of “taffy terrain,” a weird Martian geological formation unique to the Red Planet that scientists as yet don’t quite understand. This 2014 paper only says this:
The apparent sensitivity to local topography and preference for concentrating in localized depressions is compatible with deformation as a viscous fluid. In addition, the bands display clear signs of degradation and slumping at their margins along with a suite of other features that include fractured mounds, polygonal cracks at variable size-scales, and knobby/hummocky textures. Together, these features suggest an ice-rich composition for at least the upper layers of the terrain, which is currently being heavily modified through loss of ice and intense weathering, possibly by wind.
The Japanese big space company Mitsubishi has now joined the private consortium building the Starlab commercial space station for NASA, teaming up with Voyager Space and Airbus.
At this moment it appears that Voyager, the lead company in this station, is attempting to capture the international market that up to now has been part of ISS. Airbus gets it direct access to European companies and the Europeans Space Agency (ESA). Mitsubishi now gets it direct access to Japanese government financing.
The other stations being built with NASA financing, Axiom and Orbital Reef, so far seem more focused on getting American business, as is Vast’s Haven-1 station, being built entirely from private funds.
Thailand today signed an agreement with China to become the eighth nation to join its partnership to build its lunar base on the Moon, dubbed the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).
The partners so far are Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, and Venezuela. In addition, another nine academic organizations of one kind or another have signed on. Except for Russia, the partners in China’s program are mostly there for public relations purposes, and will contribute little to the project. And Russia itself will likely not contribute much either, considering its inability to get any major new projects launched for the past two decades.
Though engineers have now confirmed the cause of the computer problem that has prevented Voyager-1 from sending back readable data, a fix has not yet been attempted and the spacecraft remains in safe mode.
In early March, the team issued a “poke” command to prompt the spacecraft to send back a readout of the FDS [Flight Data Subsystem] memory, which includes the computer’s software code as well as variables (values used in the code that can change based on commands or the spacecraft’s status). Using the readout, the team has confirmed that about 3% of the FDS memory has been corrupted, preventing the computer from carrying out normal operations.
The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working. Engineers can’t determine with certainty what caused the issue. Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years.
Although it may take weeks or months, engineers are optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally without the unusable memory hardware, which would enable Voyager 1 to begin returning science and engineering data again.
Considering that Voyager-1’s power supply will run out sometime in 2026, after almost a half century of operation, the engineers really don’t have that much time to fix the problem and resume science operations.
Like an Energizer bunny: SpaceX last night successfully placed 23 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.
The first stage successfully completed its 14th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
34 SpaceX
14 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined 39 to 25, while SpaceX by itself leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 34 to 30. SpaceX also has another launch scheduled for tonight.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
There appears to be a lot of red tape still in the way, but it is expected the service will be available by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, there are rumors this testing is delaying the launch until the fall, and that ULA wants to bump Tenacity from its second Vulcan launch because of these delays. ULA needs that second launch quickly in order to begin doing military launches.
Officials also say it might recover the first stage before the end of ’25 if “they get lucky.”
Bring a gun to a knife fight: When the Texas state legislature passed a law last May (subsequently signed by Governor Greg Abbott) to ban all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in state colleges, I expressed some doubts about whether this legislature would work.
The universities have simply been told the money they formally spent on DEI can no longer be spent on such racist operations. Since they have the cash anyway, what will prevent college administrators to create a new office with a new name, let’s call it the “Openness and Support Office”, and hire the fired DEI staffers that have been terminated from a different college. By simply rearranging the chairs, these administrators — who apparently all enthusiastically support DEI’s Marxist and racist program — can recreate it without making it obvious. And the legislature has agreed to give them the funds for doing so.
It appears the DEI house-cleaning is beginning
in Texas’ universities.
Since then, Texas university administrations have been responding to the legislation in a variety of ways, all of which suggest that, though my doubts continue to have merit, the bill is having a laudatory effect. This week the University of Texas at Austin announced that it is shuttering its DEI offices and terminating around sixty people associated with these bigoted programs. From the email announcement by the university president, Jay Hartzell:
[F]unding used to support DEI across campus prior to SB 17’s effective date will be redeployed to support teaching and research. As part of this reallocation, associate or assistant deans who were formerly focused on DEI will return to their full-time faculty positions. The positions that provided support for those associate and assistant deans and a small number of staff roles across campus that were formerly focused on DEI will no longer be funded.
Click for original map.
The Austrialia rocket starup Gilmour has now assembled its first Eris rocket in anticipation of its first orbital test launch from that company’s Bowen spaceport on the east coast of Australia.
According to the report at the link, the launch could happen “in the coming weeks,” though no date has been set. Gilmour has already received its spaceport license from the Australian government, but has not yet gotten its launch license from the Australian Space Agency, despite putting in its application two years ago.
It appears there is now a race between this spaceport and the one on the south coast run by Southern Launch to launch first. Both are saying they will launch in mere weeks, but both are also awaiting launch approvals from the Australian Space Agency, which appears to be having difficulties making these first approvals. Either it is dragging its feet, or doesn’t know how to do this yet. Hopefully the bureaucrats will figure out how to say yes to freedom and let these spaceports and companies finally launch, before they run out of cash.
Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday announced that it has picked three commercial companies, Astrolab, Intuitive Machines, and Lunar Outpost, to begin feasibility design work on its new manned lunar rovers, dubbed a Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV), for its planned Artemis missions to the Moon.
NASA will acquire the LTV as a service from industry. The indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity, milestone-based Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services contract with firm-fixed-price task orders has a combined maximum potential value of $4.6 billion for all awards.
The three companies are actually each a partnership of several American companies, as follows:
All three lead companies are essentially startups that have partnered with older established players, a likely requirement imposed by NASA to give their effort some experienced help. Though this system of dividing up the work between all the players follows the old scheme used by NASA and the established big space companies for decades in order to guarantee every company gets steady work and a continuing cash flow from the government, the difference is that the product will be designed, built, and owned by each partnership, not NASA, allowing each to sell that product to others outside the agency.
If this goes as planned, eventually the government money will become somewhat irrelevant, once a real commercial industry starts functioning in space and on the Moon. That’s what happened in the airplane industry in the 1920s to the 1950s.
Engineers have now confirmed the software fix they sent to the IXPE space telescope on March 26, 2024 has worked, and have taken the telescope out of safe mode so that it can resume science observations.
The IXPE mission is now observing a new transient X-ray source – Swift J1727.8–161 – a candidate accreting black hole. The source has recently begun producing jets of material moving at a fraction of the speed of light. The IXPE observations will help to understand accretion onto black holes, including potentially revealing how the relativistic jets are formed.
The telescope observes the universe in X-rays, but does so by observing its polarization. This approach provides information not seen in direct observations.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
CURIE is a student-built probe and is part of a cubesat initiative funded partly by NASA.
The explosive burst at launch makes me wonder if the solid-fuel wasn’t evenly installed. North Korea’s claims about this missile are also unsubstantiated.
When this crew arrived, the Soviets for the first time had two crews of three on a space station.
It hopes to launch sometime this year from the Saxavord spaceport in the Shetland Islands, Scotland, assuming the UK’s bureaucracy finally issues launch permits.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on January 16, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Because an electronic unit for one of this camera’s filters has failed, causing a blank strip in the image center, I have filled in that gap using an MRO context camera image taken October 31, 2015.
The scientists describe this geology as “ridged terrain.” What I see is a surface that was like wet plaster once, and then a giant finger touched it and pulled away quickly, so that as it left some material pulled upward to create random ridges within the depression created by that finger.
These ridges are inside a very very ancient 110-mile-wide crater dubbed Margulis. According to the 2021 poster [pdf] of the scientists who did the first geological mapping of this crater, the crater floor “show remnants of sedimentary materials, suggesting the [crater was] subjected to widespread episodes of resurfacing and denudation.”
Though located in the dry equatorial regions, this ridged terrain suggests it formed suddenly when underground ice sublimated into gas, bursting upward to break the surface when the gas pressure became high enough.
» Read more
The orbital module of China’s Shenzhou-15 manned capsule, launched with three astronauts in November 2022 and then abandoned in orbit when those astronauts returned to Earth in the spring of 2023, burned up over southern California yesterday.
The fall created a blazing fireball witnessed by people from the Sacramento area all the way down to San Diego, according to the American Meteor Society (AMS). As of Tuesday afternoon, 81 people had reported sightings of the event to the AMS.
It is unlikely, though not impossible, that any pieces hit the ground. The module is considered small enough to be destroyed during descent. Nonetheless, its uncontrolled re-entry highlights China’s general irresponsibility when it comes to space junk. For example, the Russia Soyuz capsule has a similar design, but based on history Russia has for decades routinely controlled the de-orbit of its abandoned orbital module so that it does not come down over land.
It appears that technical issues with Lockheed Martin’s Orion capsule are one of the main reasons NASA has had to delay next Artemis mission, the first to put humans inside that capsule and then take them around the Moon.
In January 2024 it was reported that the mission would be delayed from a launch before the end of 2024 until 2025. We now know why:
NASA is working with Orion spacecraft prime contractor Lockheed Martin to resolve a handful of issues that came up late last year during ground testing, forcing the space agency to delay the launch readiness target date for its Artemis II circumlunar mission to September 2025. The Lockheed Martin assembly, test, and launch operations (ATLO) team at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) is reinstalling some electronics and implementing workarounds for others affected by an electrical circuit flaw found in digital motor controllers on the spacecraft.
While a resolution to that issue appears to be getting closer, the Orion program and contractor teams are also working through the corrective actions process for a problem with how the Orion batteries handle the shock of an extreme abort case.
In other words, Lockheed Martin discovered these two electrical issues only last year, after spending almost two decades and more than $15 billion developing Orion.
As I predicted in January, “None of these dates will be met. I predict that further delays will be announced next year and the year after that, pushing all these missions back again, in small increments.” I also predicted that NASA will be lucky to land a human on the Moon by 2030, a mere fifteen years after its original target date of 2015, set by George Bush Jr. in 2004.
In the meantime, expect SpaceX’s Starship to begin regularly commercial and governmental flights to the Moon in the next five years. Long before SLS and Orion put humans on the Moon, Starship will be doing it privately for less cost.
In a policy announcement yesterday, the White House has directed NASA to establish a coordinated lunar time standard (dubbed LTC) for time on the Moon, similar to Univeral or Greenwich time (UTC) now used on Earth.
A unified time standard—Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC)—will act as the established standard to enable cislunar operations and can be tied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the primary time standard globally used to regulate clocks and time on Earth. This policy directs NASA to work with the Departments of Commerce, Defense, State, and Transportation to deliver a strategy for the implementation of LTC no later than December 31, 2026. NASA will also coordinate with other federal agencies as appropriate and international partners through existing international forums, including Artemis Accords partner nations.
As noted in the full policy statement [pdf]:
Due to general and special relativity, the length of a second defined on Earth will appear distorted to an observer under different gravitational conditions, or to an observer moving at a high relative velocity. For example, to an observer on the Moon, an Earth-based clock will appear to lose on
average 58.7 microseconds per Earth-day with additional periodic variations.
While this difference would be utterly unnoticed by people, the difference will become a problem for GPS systems and other very sensitive systems that depend on precise timing. The new policy will attempt to prevent such issues by getting ahead of the problem. It will also work to coordinate this new lunar universal time with other nations doing lunar exploration.
According to TASS, Russia’s state-run press, its space agency Roscosmos has now approved the design of its proposed new Russian Orbital Station (ROS), with a targeted launch date sometime between 2027 and 2032.
The station’s core module will have six docking ports for accommodating add-on modules. Each of the station’s modules will be replaceable, if necessary, so the ROS’s service life is likely to last decades.
The station will stay in a polar orbit with an inclination of up to 97 degrees.
That last feature will make this station unique, as all other previous and planned manned space stations use orbits relatively close to the equator so they never fly over the poles. ROS’s orbit will allow it to see almost the entire Earth surface, including all of Russia.
Despite the fact that this design is essentially the same as the Mir station the Soviet Union launched in 1986 and operated until the late 1990s, do not expect this new station to launch on schedule. Based on Russia’s track record since the fall of the Soviet Union, expect many delays that will stretch development into decades. If its first module launches before 2032 I will be amazed.
In order to work around scheduling issues at ISS, NASA and Boeing have now scheduled the first manned Starliner mission to launch no earlier than May 6, 2024.
Following a review of the International Space Station operations, NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test now is targeting no earlier than Monday, May 6, for Starliner’s first launch with astronauts to the orbital complex. The date adjustment optimizes space station schedule of activities planned toward the end of April, including a cargo spacecraft undocking and a crew spacecraft port relocation required for Starliner docking. NASA and Boeing also are performing prelaunch closeout work and completing final certification for flight.
Two astronauts will fly the capsule to ISS for a two week stay, testing its systems in order to determine if it is ready for regular operations.
This launch is years behind schedule due to numerous technical problems that have cost Boeing billions in extra costs as well as lost income. In order to convince other customers besides NASA to buy seats on Starliner will likely require the capsule to fly many times without issues. Until then, I suspect anyone wishing to do a tourist flight in space will pick SpaceX instead, because of its now proven safety and reliability record.
China yesterday successfully launched what it described simply as a “remote sensing” satellite, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from it Xichang launch site in the southwest of China.
No word whether the rocket’s lower stage, using toxic hypergolic fuel, crashed near any habitable areas inside China.
The leaders in the 2024 space race:
33 SpaceX
14 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise still leads the entire world combined in successful launches 38 to 25, and SpaceX by itself remains ahead everyone one else combined 33 to 30.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
In recent weeks France has suddenly discovered the wonders of capitalism. This visit likely involves its recognition that ISS is soon going away, and that it will have to then deal with private commercial station operators.
More details here. The deal was finalized when Telesat switched from a European satellite manufacturer to a Canadian one.
Hot fire tests are to start this month.
It had two cameras, operated for about 2.5 months, and produced just under 23,000 pictures. It also provided meteorologists their first global view of cloud structures.
Too bad most of what it predicted in space for the rest of the 20th century never happened, and is only now beginning to come true.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on December 24, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
What makes this terrain intriguing are the series of parallel ridges that cover most of the picture, with smaller ridges at right angles filling the hollows between. It appears we are looking at two different sets of dunes, the larger ridges indicating the southeast-to-northwest direction of the prevailing winds, while the smaller ridges in the hollows suggest the wind patterns within the hollows, causing smaller ripple dunes to form at right angles.
Note however the flat patches in the lower left. The material there appears to fill the hollows, covering the dunes. We can tell this by the hollows to the east, which have an almost identical dune pattern. Those flat patches then are likely covering similar dunes, with the patched material either having been blown away to expose the lower dunes, or having been blown here to cover them in patches. That the dunes appear unchanged under this patched material when exposed also suggests strongly that these dunes are hardened into stone, no longer soft sand that can be blown by the wind.
» Read more
NOAA yesterday posted its updated monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As I do every month, I have posted this graph below, with several additional details to provide some larger context.
The sunspot activity in March dropped, continuing the pattern of the last five months, where the Sun appears to be in a stable plateau after reaching a high peak in the summer of 2023. It continues to appear that we are in the middle low saddle of a double-peaked relatively weak solar maximum, with the Sun doing what I predicted in February:
If we are now in maximum, sunspot activity throughout the rest of 2024 should fluctuate at the level it is right now, with it suddenly rising again near the end of the year for a period lasting through the first half of 2025. After that it should begin its ramp down to solar minimum.
In March 2020 the rocket startup Astra was attempting to complete its first orbital test launch. After one attempt that was scrubbed, the next ended with what the company called “an anomaly” when a fire destroyed the rocket on the launchpad.
Immediately after that failure the company furloughed one fifth of its workforce, and did not succeed in getting a rocket to orbit until November 2021, after another two failures.
Video obtained by Tech Chrunch now shows what happened on that March 2020 failure. The Astra rocket simply exploded on launchpad, destroying everything.
The company has been an example of the risks of freedom and private enterprise. It appeared to be one of the big successes, getting rockets built and launched, during which it also went public. Instead, after a few launch successes it abandoned its rocket, ran out of cash, and then the stock was purchased for pennies by the company’s two founders — taking it private once again. At the moment it is not clear if the company will ever rise from the ashes.
In other words, buyer beware. The claims of any new company is not to be trusted blindly. Sometimes their claims are filled with hubris.
It appears that a 2-pound piece of a de-orbiting “cargo pallet” from ISS bored through the roof of a house in Florida on March 8, 2024 and broke through two floors.
A Nest home security camera captured the sound of the crash at 2:34 pm local time (19:34 UTC) on March 8. That’s an important piece of information because it is a close match for the time—2:29 pm EST (19:29 UTC)—that US Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris from the space station. At that time, the object was on a path over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward southwest Florida.
This space junk consisted of depleted batteries from the ISS, attached to a cargo pallet that was originally supposed to come back to Earth in a controlled manner. But a series of delays meant this cargo pallet missed its ride back to Earth, so NASA jettisoned the batteries from the space station in 2021 to head for an unguided reentry.
NASA had taken possession of the piece to determine for certain if it is from ISS. Who is liable for the damages could become a legal tangle. The depleted batteries were owned by NASA, but were brought to ISS on a Japanese HTV cargo freighter. According to the Outer Space Treaty, the nation that launches an item is liable for any damages it causes when it crashes back on Earth. The language however doesn’t really cover a case where one nation builds the item for launch, and another nation launches it.
The owner, Alejandro Otero, had to use Twitter to get a response from NASA. According to his tweet, he had called and emailed the agency and had been ignored. Only after other news sources picked up the story did NASA respond. Furthermore, when NASA jettisoned the pallet from ISS it had insisted that the discarded batteries would burn up entirely in the atmosphere, even though other experts said differently.
The Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research and development center, says a “general rule of thumb” is that 20 to 40 percent of the mass of a large object will reach the ground. The exact percentage depends on the design of the object, but these nickel-hydrogen batteries were made of metals with relatively high density. Ahead of the reentry, the European Space Agency also acknowledged some fragments from the battery pallet may survive to the ground.
What this information tells us is that NASA knew this discarded pallet posed a risk, but made believe it didn’t.
SpaceX tonight successfully placed another 22 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage completed its fifteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2024 space race:
33 SpaceX
13 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the entire world combined in successful launches 38 to 24, and SpaceX by itself remains ahead everyone one else combined 33 to 29.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
Launch is now scheduled for April 8, 2024.
I’ve cued to about T-30 seconds. Some beautiful footage.
Don’t ask me to explain this. The Devas Antrix legal case has been wandering through various international courts since 2005, and I have never been able to find a clear explanation for the court battles. What I do know is that it involves Antrix, what was then the commercial arm of India’s ISRO space agency, and a number of international companies, all of which have sued when the project was canceled.
Commercial satellites have been using this technology now for probably two-plus decades.
